


Shampain

by TheGingerGhost



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anxiety, Gen, Implied/Referenced Past Child Abuse, It's only really an AU because Rose is Roxy's biological child, Minor Character Death, POV Second Person, Second Person Past Tense, The OCs are Roxy's family, Unintentional Child Neglect, character backstory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-14
Updated: 2020-06-14
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:54:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24716386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheGingerGhost/pseuds/TheGingerGhost
Summary: Rose knows you as "Mom" -- a passive-aggressive irritant and a neglectful, dysfunctional parent. But your name is Roxane Aimée Lalonde, and your story did not start with your daughter and her friends playing a certain game...
Relationships: Rose Lalonde & Rose's Mom | Beta Roxy Lalonde, Rose's Mom | Beta Roxy Lalonde & Original Character(s)
Kudos: 4





	Shampain

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this before I knew the kids were created by ectobiology, but other than that, it's as canon-compliant as I could make it... for all that it doesn't actually cover much of canon. No Mom/Dad, though I don't know why. As always, please let me know if I've missed any tags and/or trigger warnings. (The title has nothing to do with the fic itself.)

Your name is Roxane Aimée Lalonde.

From the moment you and your twin were born on the fourth of December, 1969, it was an odd thing to see you and René apart. As babies, neither of you would settle unless you could share the same crib, or at the very least be close enough to see each other. Your parents (your mother Victoire, who came from old New Orleans money, and your father Jean-Luc who was from a blue-blooded family in France) soon realized that the former option was preferable to the latter, as both of you were quite fussy during the day if you didn’t share the same crib. Of course, that wasn’t to say that your parents were very involved in your childhood. You and René were raised mostly by nannies and servants, though your parents were quite involved in your education. Being quite staunch in the beliefs of family traditions, Victoire began teaching you early, while your father began to train René in the ways of the family business at around the same time.

From your earliest memories, which were around when you were about five, your life had always had two constants. The first was your brother and how protective he was of you, though he knew you could take care of yourself, what with how you took to the self-defense training you both received like a fish to water. The second was your mother’s constant overbearing nature when it came to your lessons in etiquette, comportment, and the finer points of everything required to be accepted into high society as a lady. You hated it from the very beginning. Well, perhaps not from the _very_ beginning, but as soon as you were old enough to realize all what of the restrictions that had been placed on you meant. You couldn’t have friends unless they were approved by Victoire. Every single hour of your day, from the moment you woke until you finally passed out in the evening, was dictated to you by your tutors and your mother; Victoire herself oversaw your etiquette training.

Your lessons were so ridged, that you barely had enough time to breathe as you were growing up, let alone to try and figure yourself out. The mundane education you and René received wasn’t allowed to fall through the cracks, either. You were both enrolled at the highest profile schools (that weren’t boarding schools), had the highest spoken of tutors your parents could find, and were told in no uncertain terms that nothing less than perfect would ever be accepted. It was around the time you were fourteen, when your aunt Rosalie finally put her foot down. Over the years, you and René had grown close to your mother’s older sister and your cousins (though you had always been closer to Brigitte than Hénri), as the Benoits would always spend the summer and holidays with you. Whenever you managed to slip away from your mother/tutors’ watch (helped covertly by sympathetic servants and staff) you could be found with Rosalie and Brigitte. Your aunt wasn’t nearly as concerned about raising her children the way that she and Victoire had been.

In fact, that was precisely _why_ she had ended up putting her foot down when you and René were fourteen. After much ~~shouting~~ deliberation, the sisters finally came to an agreement, one that their husbands didn’t seem to mind. (Antoine because he sympathized with you two, and Jean-Luc because he was more focused on René’s training than anything else and didn’t see the harm, as his brother-in-law was also part of the family business.) It was decided that you and René would spend every summer with Rosalie and her family up in Albany, New York, and when you and your brother reached legal majority, you could choose what to do with your lives. Provided that you and René continued to perform up to Victoire’s standards during the school year, of course. The summers over a thousand miles away from your parents (1,427.2 miles, to be exact), gave you and your brother room to grow and to figure yourselves out.

Four years of summers gave you and René the time to find your places in the world, figure out what you wanted, and to learn how your abilities and skills fit in with everything else. Four years of summers helped you to bloom into your spunky personality, though René always remained more reserved. Four years of summers gave you the opportunity to experiment, to meet people, and to figure out what sexuality and romantic orientation even were. Four years of summers showed you two that, while René was the genius when it came to hardware (with the correct parts, he could literally build a computer better than the most expensive models on the market), software and coding was your niche. Not that anything ever changed in New Orleans, of course; your mother was just as ridged, while your father was just as focused on René. Everything finally changed (for the better if anyone asked you and René, for the worse if anyone asked your parents), the December you turned eighteen.

Neither of you bothered to leave your parents any form of explanation. As far as you were concerned, neither Victoire or Jean-Luc _deserved_ one. From the night of December fourth to the morning of December fifth, you were gone, and you wouldn’t ever come back of your own free will. Since her own children were away living their own lives, and her husband had passed away earlier that year, Rosalie was glad to see the two of you on her doorstep on the evening following your birthday. With your mother’s refusal to accept anything less than perfect (and nothing less than a 4.0 GPA), you and your brother had already completed and passed the courses required to graduate the previous year, so there was little fuss from the administration when you didn’t show up for your second semester. You were simply mailed your diplomas at the address you eventually provided, along with a note wishing you both well from your favorite teachers.

As far as you were concerned, your lives truly began at eighteen, when you and René moved in with your aunt in Albany and applied for college in New York City starting in the fall. René chose to major in robotics and minor in engineering, while you – ever the perfectionist, as you were afraid of displeasing people even then – were going after a dual major in computer science and astrophysics, with a dual minor in history and creative writing. Meticulous as always, you figured you would need a backup plan; writing historical fiction books and/or fantasy books if your dream didn’t pan out was that backup plan. Along with attending college (you and René shared a dorm room and would come home to stay with your aunt on the weekends), you both got part-time jobs. You ended up with a job at a local florist, mostly to give your brain a break from your classes, while René got a job at the local videogame store/gamer-hangout repairing and refurbishing consoles.

It was shortly before your twentieth birthday when the news of your father’s death reached you. You didn’t react to the development, if truth be told, uncaring for a man that you had never really known. But René became quieter than usual; naturally, you worried. You had always worried about your brother (not least because you were the older twin), but now, you worried even more. It made your grades suffer, and the anxiety of disappointing your family – though it had been more than two years since anyone pushed either of you to do things you didn’t want – caused you to have a series of panic attacks that eventually culminated in a full-scale mental breakdown. For the second time in your twenty years of life, Rosalie put her foot down. She refused to see you work yourself sick; eventually you were persuaded to drop both you minors, and to begin therapy.

The fact that you were soon proscribed mediation for your anxiety was a good thing, but your now less restricted time wasn't. A less intense school program gave you time to think, and time to worry. Trying to stave off your ~~mostly irrational~~ fears, you ended up fine-tuning your hacking and programming skills in your downtime. This was eventually what led to your being discovered by major companies, once you were caught tinkering with their security. You were sure that you would be arrested, but you instead found yourself with a job – one that paid surprisingly well, to boot. Apparently, your cheeky, cavalier run down of all the ways that their security was either lacking or could be improved upon had been what had gotten you the job, even if it was only a temporary one. Upon graduating college, six months before your twenty-second birthday, you were one of a few of your peers that already had a job.

You had done your masters thesis number-crunching cosmic phenomena with a supercomputer. Plotting binary neutron stars, black holes, pulsars, that sort of thing. The project had been right up your alley, marrying your programming prowess with your love for all things space-related. Officially, when it came to your job, you were hired on a temporary basis as a software and/or security consultant; unofficially, everyone knew that you were actually a hacker-for-hire. You and René rented an apartment in NYC, but at least once a week you would spend a few nights with your aunt. Rosalie would get lonely, though she never said it, and she had been more of a mother to you than Victoire _ever_ was. Almost as soon as you graduated, you applied to a doctorate program, furthering your work with computer science and astrophysics. If all went to plan, in just over six years you’d have a dual doctorate focused on discrete math, software engineering, and massively parallel computing.

Something else that developed during that time, was that over the years an uneasy, tentative olive branch had been extended to your "mother." It was an olive branch that you were often sorely tempted to snap in half, as Victoire hadn’t changed much. Your father’s death had softened her only a modicum, and even René – who was neutral when it came to your mother – could barely stand to talk to her for a few minutes every two weeks. Life settled into a pattern, but patterns didn’t last very long in your family. Despite being meticulous and determinedly driven, you had come across alcohol during your time in college, developing a taste for it quickly. Of course, given your anxiety medication, you made sure never to mix the two substances, even if you did sometimes have a drink to unwind after a particularly stressful day of classes. René was perhaps a bit concerned, but Rosalie didn’t seem to mind. You were half French, after all; a taste for wine was in your blood.

Unlike most college goers that developed a taste for alcohol, though, you never had an interest in parties. That said, it seemed that your later years of schooling were different, as you would attend a party every now and then. Nearing the end of your doctorate studies, when you were twenty-six, you attended a party that seemed like any other at the outset. By the time you regained consciousness the next day, you discovered that it had been far from normal. You had a relatively high tolerance, built up over the past few years as the stress got to you, but you were always careful not to exceed your limits. In other words, that night was the first time you were drunk enough to have no memory of what happened. Not that it was hard to figure out, waking up next to some random guy in a cheap motel room. Gathering yourself and your things swiftly, you had absconded as quickly as you dared, berating yourself all the while for being stupid enough to let this happen.

It seemed to have been a one-off incident, and you were happy enough to forget it entirely. Three months later, in June it came back to haunt you. Being single and pregnant was never something that you had planned on, let alone being single and pregnant concurrent with being roughly halfway through finishing your doctorate. But, thankfully, you weren’t alone. René would always have your back, and as your cousins had gradually stopped keeping contact (Brigitte was in San Francisco; God alone knew Hénri was) your aunt was more than willing to help. Throughout the duration of the pregnancy, the easiest thing turned out to be giving up alcohol; other things proved to be more difficult to work through. The main concern was the anxiety medication you'd been taking, which had never been more critical to your mental health and stability. In the end, you were switched to a type that would present less risks for you little one, since it was obvious stopping your medication would have done more harm than good.

On the subject of your studies, you were steadfastly determined as ever. Even if it meant easing up on your almost obsessive-compulsive need for personal perfection (which you had your mother to thank for), you would do whatever it took to finish your courses and give your child the best possible forecast and outlook when it came to their future. In September, you all but forced your twin to come with you to find out the sex of your baby, though to be perfectly honest René wasn’t complaining all that much. He seemed almost excited to support you, which you knew meant that he was ecstatic; reading each other’s true emotions was something you had always been good at, after all. Your aunt was overjoyed as well, something you found amusing for no discernible reason, and Rosalie almost immediately began knitting baby clothes in soft pastel colors. As the universe seemed to have a strange sense of humor, your daughter was born on the third of December, a day before you and René turned twenty-seven.

Out of gratitude to the woman who was more a mother to you than Victoire had ever been, you named your daughter Rose. In that same vein, in homage to your best friend and platonic other half, Rose’s middle name became Renée. Her surname was of course Lalonde, as you refused to think of the man that had fathered her as anything other than an accidental sperm donor. With the help of your aunt and brother, and thanks to some very understanding professors, you managed to keep up with the minimum course requirements by doing course work at home during the first month after Rose's birth. By the middle of January, you were back to attending classes, though you still did only a hair more than the minimum requirements. You wanted to spend as much time with Rose as you could, and if that meant backing off a bit, then so be it. Of course, even backing off on compulsively going above and beyond the course requirements, most times you only got a few hours with Rose in the evenings before you ended up passing out.

Rosalie and René were infinitely helpful in that regard, and before you were quite aware of time passing, your daughter was two and you’d finished with your doctorate. That summer was when you purchased the house in Rainbow Falls, both wanting Rose to grow up away from the insanity that is New York City, and to give your aunt and brother some space. And yet, in the end, that space was responsible for shattering your tiny family. A freak accident on their way up to visit for Rose’s fifth birthday took your best friend and your surrogate mother from you. It resulted in a downward spiral that ended with medication by the wayside and high-functioning alcoholism, a point you never expected to reach. Depression ate at you, but Rose had become the focus of your life ever since she was born – your inadequacies wouldn't impact her life, if you had anything to say about it. Of course, fate and the universe always had a twisted sense of humor; much as you tried to keep yourself from hurting her, even at a young age your daughter came to resent you.

A cat wasn’t a way to patch things up, but you didn’t know what else to do, enrolling Rose in online classes and burying yourself in your work to try and stave off spiraling even further. Working for Skaianet turned out to be as confusing as it was lucrative, but when it came to taking care of Rose – if what you’d been doing could be called that – money was a means to an end. Time became liquid; you blinked, and suddenly your child was thirteen, with nothing more than animosity and passive-aggressive competitions between you. Work was an escape, in the end. Work, and alcohol, even though you knew those things were what brought you to that point to begin with. But work came to haunt you before your alcoholism did; Rose and her friends played the game that you helped to develop, and everything changed.

You face your death knowing her friends would do more for Rose than you ever had.


End file.
